Victor Picca wanted to bring a part of his high school life to Penn State.

"Back home I played in a wiffleball league," Picca, a junior, said. "I really liked it. It's pretty competitive and it's a lot of fun so I just decided I'd bring it down here."

This fall, the wiffleball club is one of four new club sports -- along with track, airsoft, and taiji, a form of martial arts.

These new clubs, in addition to more than 68 clubs that were active last year, help to comprise the largest club sports program in the country, Penn State Club Sports coordinator Tommy Otterbine said.

Otterbine said that last year almost 4,000 students participated in the various clubs, which is almost one in every 10 or 11 students on campus.

Otterbine added part of the reason the number of participants in club sports has grown to this "mind-boggling" number is the new clubs that students are creating every year.

"It's just students interested in something that we don't have," Otterbine said. "If it's a sport or physical activity they come to us and they start talking to us about it."

Picca felt one of those sports that was missing from the vast selection of club sports was wiffleball.

He began working on forming the wiffleball club last November and the long process to make it official, which includes creating a constitution and a petition as to why the club should exist, concluded within the past couple of weeks.

Despite being recognized as an official club for such a short time, the wiffleball club has already garnered a lot of interest from students. Although Picca said he hasn't done much work on recruiting members yet, he has about 40 students who have inquired via e-mail about joining. Once enough students hand in their participation agreements, the team will begin to play.

Picca described the way the club will run as similar to intramurals and said the members

would most likely gather every week.

Although the team will solely compete within the club, Picca said that factor may change as the club grows.

"Hopefully, eventually in the future we can find some other schools maybe and try to get a tournament going," he said.

One of the other clubs that has become official over the past few weeks is the airsoft club, founded by senior John Healy.

Healy, who played paintball in high school, first played airsoft -- a similar game that is played with compressed air guns -- last

year and was immediately intrigued.

After discovering Lock Haven had a club team, he decided to start one at Penn State.

The team will play at a field in Mill Hall, Pa., which Healy said is about a 20-minute drive from State College.

"Basically, you know, we just want to have an avenue for people who are interested in it to play," Healy said.

"We just want to make people aware and get people together who are interested so, you know, the more the merrier."